Building the world’s largest radio telescope will come with lots of infrastructure issues to start with. One of the biggest problems researchers will face is how to analyze the massive amount of data that will be collected. One solution may be to turn to the public for some extra computing power.

Australia wants to host the world’s biggest and most sensitive radio telescope, and as part of its bid to land the $2.1 billion Square Kilometer Array (SKA) the joint Aussie-New Zealand effort is going go launch a massive cloud computing initiative in September to prove it can handle the data flow. The initiative could quickly turn into one of the largest scientific cloud computing networks in the world, tapping the computing power and storage offered up by desktop computers worldwide.